GMSK modulation for reverberation limited underwater acoustic time reversal mirror based communication

Time reversal mirror as a tool for spatio-temporal focusing is investigated for reverberation limited underwater acoustic communication. The dominant source of reverberation considered is from the ocean bottom. Link level simulations for signal and reverberation are performed to study BER characteristics using a ray-theoretic underwater channel propagation model. GMSK modulated signals employed with time-reversal mirror technique are shown to achieve significant improvement in BER and throughput. BER trends for various GMSK-based time-bandwidth product values and range-depth combinations show that a BER improvement of 2 orders of magnitude is possible, leading to newly realizable telemetry architectures.